Cianalas

Fell asleep reading. The fireside sphinx. 1901.

We are coming. Fascists beware.

Join the correct side of history.

Chicago:

Boston

Wild Silence (2023) by British fine art painter and illustrator, Angela Harding (born in 1960).

Linocut print

This is going to be a really hard pill to swallow, but the truth is you might not be able to balance all your hobbies and all your projects the way you'd like. If you want to finish writing that book, you might have to reduce your daily drawing habit to a couple of times a week. If you want to do yoga every morning, you might have to accept not cooking from scratch as often. If you want to spend more time with your family, you might have to cut down on your yearly reading goal. I'm not saying give up on your hobbies; I'm be realistic with your time and your energy and be kind to yourself. Stop expecting yourself to do more and do better every single year. You don't have to constantly be growing upwards and reaching for the stars; you can be content with where you are, or even cut parts of yourself back to make space for other things in your life to bloom.

Not-at-all-casual-reminder that she left Reddit in 2015 after being forced to resign because Reddit lost its collective shit at her when the site banned 5 subreddits for harassment; not-at-fucking-all casual reminder that Ellen Pao was the CEO of Reddit when it banned revenge porn after The Fappening.

One of the subreddits that was banned that led to her resignation was r/fatpeople hate. The others were transphobic and racist.

In her time at Reddit Pao did more than the site had ever before done to fight harassment from its user base and for that someone started a subreddit calling for her firing and trying to make nazi and ISIS imagery come up in searches associated with her name.

If *anyone* in the tech industry knows what the blackpill subculture is like and how vile and toxic groups spawned in subreddits can be it’s Ellen Pao.

This isn’t someone who’s oblivious to the fact that her former company is a source of the problem, this is someone who is speaking from personal experience with online harassment campaigns orchestrated by people who want the freedom to post celebrity nudes who were *enraged* that she made it harder for them to do so.

Her lawsuit was one of the first in a wave that became known as #metoo. One of the first women to step forward and publicly throw herself into the fire in protest of sexism.

And she’s still speaking truth about how sexist and racist tech bro/VC/PE culture is.

Displayed on the Old North Church in Boston, MA on April 18, 2025, the 250th anniversary of Paul Revere’s ride.